The disclosed aspects relate to wireless broadcast systems, and more particularly, to systems and methods for using data object popularity measurements to improve quality of service perception in wireless broadcast systems.
Large-scale deployment of mass media services/media objects over wireless communication networks may utilize broadcast/multicast network capabilities. Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Service (MBMS) and Broadcast and Multicast Service (BCMCS), as proposed by telecommunications specifications-setting projects, such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2), as well as, MediaFLO™ technology as developed and available from Qualcomm Incorporated of San Diego, Calif., are targeted towards enabling multimedia content transfer to handheld communication devices over the wireless channel. The MediaFLO™ broadcast network provides services that allow transfer of media objects, such as digital movie clips, sports broadcasts, video clips and music files. These media objects are delivered by a content provider to the MediaFLO™ network, where they are stored until the scheduled transmission time.
An important characteristic of broadcast services is that the radio transmission cost is independent of the number of subscribers m the cell. This provides a resource-efficient way of delivering, services/media objects to large user groups and, hence, improves the scalability of the network. However, resource-efficient broadcast/multicast communication has some potential inefficiency. For example, diverse channel conditions between the sender and its many receivers make the problem of providing reliable transfer a challenging task. Forward Error Correction (FEC) techniques would require redundancy levels sufficient to overcome transmission losses for the receiver in the worst-ease radio channel. Hence, system resources, such as channel data rate, channel code rate, transmit power, arid the like, are essentially a function of the worst-case radio channel.
Therefore, a need exists to develop a method for “intelligently” allocating network resources, such as throughput capacity/bandwidth, in broadcast/multicast networks. Intelligent allocation of network resources would overcome current inefficiencies in allocating resources based on a worst-case user/radio channel.